There are two ways to describe my family's history. The gauzy, soft-focus version casts my dad and grandfather in a quiet, bucolic picture, living on a small farmstead along a meandering stream, flanked by pretty meadows and a surround of timber that provided shade, wood and habitat for small game. At certain times of year, such as when frost ornamented the fields like glistening crystal, the setting could have been plucked from a Currier and Ives painting.
Then there is the other, grittier version. The house where they lived had two rooms, neither of which was electrified. The bathroom was an outdoor shanty. The only running water came from a well. In winter, when there was no farm work, Grandpa earned what he could clearing brush and cutting out wild hedges—brutal physical labor performed in howling winds and biting cold. Dad rode a horse two miles to the one-room school except when the horse wasn't available, and then he walked.
Both of those descriptions are accurate. Neither of them is really true.
It was only when I "interviewed" my dad a few years ago and then transcribed those tapes that I grasped the complicated reality of his childhood. What looks from this distance like crushing deprivation was then a simple fact of life, absent the despairing angst of a later generation. It was a hard life. And it was a happy life. From my father's point of view, there is ample room for both of those interpretations.
History is best learned close up. To reveal how people lived, how wars were fought, how breakthroughs were made—you need more than accumulated facts. You need perspective.
An ambitious curricular reform movement developed at the Graduate School of Education and embraced at hundreds of high schools across the United States aims to teach students to think like historians. The program, in partnership with the Library of Congress, uses original material—letters, journals, official documents—to convey a richer and rounder view of events, all the while helping students learn how to analyze and interpret what they encounter. You can read about it here.
I wish this had been available when I was in school. I learned to love and appreciate history on my own. My high school history teacher, hired mostly because he was good at coaching linebackers, turned the subject into a dreary trudge through names and dates. His typical "lesson" consisted of a series of projected transparencies paraphrased from our textbook. I could have used class time more productively by napping in the corner—and probably would have if I could have gotten away with it.
Then one day I got hold of Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. I can't remember what led me to the book, but I was mesmerized by it. The accounts of mind-numbing hardship and starvation seemed only possible as fiction. It didn't occur to me to wonder why all history wasn't this interesting, but it must have had an effect. I suddenly was staying up all night reading about D-Day and Custer's last stand, and Lewis and Clark (which goes to show I wasn't interested only in grisly stories of people dying).
If this Stanford-inspired movement becomes de rigueur, kids won't have to bump into history accidentally, as I did. Nor will they view the past as a boring litany of facts they need to know to pass a test. They might even find themselves digging through their families' past, looking for clues about their own heritage.
Kevin Cool is the executive editor of Stanford.
